A lightning event from April 2019 as detected by the LOFAR radio telescope in the Netherlands. Includes three separate flashes in less than 2 seconds. Pulses are colored by age, with bright white pulses fading to shades of blue and purple over time. Shows the entire event with annotated features.

Technical

The event consists of 122k pulses in a text file. We wrote a custom reader for ParaView, then visualized the data as points and exported to glTF. Ground imagery from Google Earth.

Project

Produced in collaboration with Brian Hare and Olaf Scholten at the University of Groningen. Winner of the Best Interact! award at the PEARC22 conference.

What next?

See the animated version!

More lightning & visualizations!

See more of Dr. Hare’s work!